I didn't present or demonstrate at the event this time, my justification for attendance being research into the maker community and how we could reach out to individual, younger, and more innovative makers, as well as understanding their needs and wants.

From the UX tech perspective, I see the Maker Faire crowd as a ripe resource for usability research into younger users and learners, and fitting in somewhere into the Oracle Applications User Experience simplification roadmap. We should look closely at three Maker Faire fave technologies in particular, and how they could be used in the enterprise space to solve real business problems:

Saves any work already done, implicitly. (Bonus points on the ADF critical task setting scale for that one.)

The following images showing my experience while reading ADF-EMGGoogle Groups notification my (Android ICS) Samsung Galaxy S2 during a loss of Wi-Fi give you a good idea of a suitable kind of messaging user experience (UX) for mobile apps in this kind of situation.

Friday Mar 09, 2012

While in Munich, I also talked about the Oracle Applications User Experience (Applications-UX) Mobile UX strategy.

The Oracle Applications-UX team has made a strategic investment in mobile user experience, with a dedicated team of cognitive psychologists; usability engineers, interaction designers, architects, and so on that innovates fast and hard, brainstorms on cutting edge mobile UX design solutions for all Oracle applications. The mobile space changes rapidly, and this presentation generated a lot of excitement and energy in the audience.

Again, I used local examples to get the message across. I used the Android version of the clever-tanken.de app as a local market example (on the day the top paid Android app in Germany) and illustrated how important ethnography is to the user-centered design process behind our mobile strategy.

Finding that cheap gas in Germany with the clever-tanken.de Android app.

For example, although almost 90% of German workers are contactable out of hours, workers don’t always want to be reached and value their work-lfe balance. VW has agreed not to contact workers in six plants in Germany on their BlackBerries out of hours accordingly. So, from a user requirements perspective in Germany it’s critical to take into account those labor unions or Betriebsräten as stakeholders.

I also explained our user-centered, multistakeholder, mobile design patterns creation process (it includes Apple consultation in the case of iPhone app designs), and how these patterns provide proven cutting edge user experience solutions in a scalable, reusable way for mobile app development teams.

Developing apps using these up-to-the-minute olutions requires a development environment to match. The ever-changing mobile O/S landscape, ADF Mobile enables developers and partners to respond rapidly to changing user experience expectations without redeveloping content. We can support the same content, easily, across different devices with no compromise on user experience or native O/S navigation or actions, while addressing mobile data security issues that customers tell us about, and more. Read the Oracle ADF Mobile white paper for more details.

If you’re presenting to worldwide audiences about mobile user experience, then I recommend that you check out appannie.com for the latest market intelligence including local app popularity charts (it's iPhone, iPad and Android right now) and some very nice infographics on the state of mobile computing. Other useful stats on mobile usage growth, including number of devices and data usage, is available from techcrunch.com.

Sunday Jul 03, 2011

For UX research and outreach purposes, capturing screenshots from live code is essential. People love to have examples from real world apps as design guidance, and mobile apps are no exception. Except, capturing screens from Android devices is a real pain. Unlike holding down two buttons on an iOS device, conventional screen capture guidance for Android usually has you fretting over the risks of rooting your expensive device first and then using a downloaded application (such as ShootMe) to take the pictures you want.

Interestingly, the idea came through that developers need to stop trying to make one O/S behave like another--on UX grounds. Also, pretty clear that a web-based paradigm is being promoting for Android (translators tell me that translating an Android app reminded them of translating web pages, too).
Haven't see the "anti"-approach before, developer cookbooks, and design patterns, sure. Check out the slideshare presentation.

Thursday Nov 26, 2009

One of the great things about my job working on the user experience user assistance team is I get to do research all aspects of user assistance on all kinds of platforms and devices. This is serious research, but it's fun too!

I love working with mobile devices, and already have too many to play with at home too.
Recently, myself and my coworker Rhonda Nelson conducted a focus group with some users of business apps on mobile devices to find out what alerts, messages or help they wanted while working.
From our research, empirical observation (and own experiences) we figured that the possibilities offered by native device capabilities might be mentioned (consider, for example, how users of GPS-capable devices like the Android HTC or Apple iPhone might use Google Maps to "help" them locate or transit), but would this expectation be borne out by the focus group? What else would be revealed by the users?